Official Guidance for Sales Teams Navigating the 2nd Trump Economy

Allow me to use Donald Trump, the 47th President of the United States, as my analogy for this article because his policies will be quite relevant for sales and business development over the next four years.  If you aren’t interested in my commentary about Trump, skip down to my predictions and advice.

My Thoughts on Trump

From among the 750 or so articles I published since Trump became the hated politician from outside the DC beltway in 2015, I mentioned Trump around a dozen times (1.5%), and every time I mentioned him, people told me to “shut up.”

For the first time, I feel like I can write an article that not only mentions Trump and policy and it will be OK.  This time around it’s different.  He won the popular vote, most corporate CEOs support him, most business people like him, and most people want common sense instead of four years of men who can get pregnant, biological men playing women’s sports and sharing women’s locker rooms, criminals not being prosecuted or imprisoned, paying for the housing, schooling and healthcare of those who are here illegally, and merit taking a back seat to DEI. For the most part, he has a very capable team of appointees to his cabinet and key positions and that bodes well for everyone.

Policies aside, we still have high inflation, wars, crime, and out-of-control immigration issues.  And while Trump will certainly tackle those issues, they won’t go away in a day, a month, or even a year, as everyone knows these things take time to fix.

My Predictions and Advice

CEOs and consumers are confident of a big rebound from the past four years and where there is confidence, there is growth.  That means spending freezes will thaw.  There will be decisions to spend, invest, introduce new initiatives as well as follow through on those that have been on hold.  Money will begin to flow. Brick and mortar stores haven’t been closing down simply because consumers have been buying online.  Consumers have been buying online because the joy of shopping was destroyed by fear of crime and violence, and too many incompetent employees working in their stores.  I believe retailers will soon invest in their stores and work to get customers to return too.

Let’s discuss three ways the Trump economy will positively affect sales organizations:

1. It will be easier to schedule meetings because people will be empowered to do business – hooray!
2. It may be easier to reach decision makers because they only hide when they aren’t interested in spending.  Fantastic!
3. Sales cycles will be shorter because there will no longer be reasons to procrastinate the decisions and that’s great news!

But with that good news, I do need to caution you on five things:

1. There will be more competition. There will be a war for talent and there will be more competitors vying for the business you already have and are attempting to win.  Renewed interest in what you sell baits salespeople into selling transactionally instead of consultatively and when that happens, conversations default to pricing and only one company can have the lowest price.  Beware and avoid a race to the bottom by making sure that your sales team has the ability to take a consultative approach, uncover compelling reasons to buy, sell value, and differentiate.  Only 15% of all salespeople are strong in the Consultative Selling competency, and only 41% are strong in the Value Seller competency.
2. There will be more engagement which, after the last four years, will be easy to mistake for genuine interest.  This causes salespeople to have happy ears and leads to incorrect assumptions and predictions about whether or not an opportunity will be won.  Only 27% of all salespeople are strong in the Qualifying Competency and only 44% are strong in the Closing Competency.
3. While there will be more engagement and some ability to reach decision makers, only 46% of all salespeople are effective reaching decision makers and others will continue to struggle in this area .
4. In an effort to fill the new sales jobs, there will be many in sales roles who lack experience which puts a lot of ineffective salespeople on the job.  The very first thing new salespeople must develop is the ability to follow the company’s sales process.  Unfortunately, only 46% of experienced salespeople follow and/or have an effective sales process so that puts newbies at an extreme disadvantage.
5. You’ll be excited about how your pipeline grows – but only if your sales team is aggressive hunting for new business.  While 67% of salespeople have the Hunter competency as a strength, BDRs, the group responsible for most of the hunting, are mostly salespeople who have been in sales for less than two years and only 36% of them are strong at Hunting.  That will be an achilles heal.  Worse, as the pipeline and enthusiasm grows it may mask the fact that most of the opportunities in the pipeline are not as well qualified as they should be because, as mentioned early, only 27% of all salespeople are strong in the Qualifying competency.

This will be a very exciting time but it will require discipline, from salespeople, from sales managers, from sales leaders, and from CEOs, COOs and CFOs.  Be among those who invest in their companies and invest heavily and appropriately in your sales teams.  They hold the key to capitalizing on the coming green wave and these times don’t come around very often.  Do you need any help?

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